


strangers; not friends

by myhomeistheshire



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 05:22:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15212114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myhomeistheshire/pseuds/myhomeistheshire
Summary: Bones thinks. (or, after and before and throughout the funeral that never should have been)





	strangers; not friends

When bones thinks of her father, she thinks: a science teacher. (A murderer, she reminds herself. Abandoner.) When she thinks of her childhood she thinks of him teaching her the bones in her body; she had panic attacks, when she was younger, fits of hysteria where she felt like she was dying; and _this is how you know yourself_  he said, to stop them. Radius, ulna, triquetal, lunate. This is what is inside you. She recited them as she sat on a swing at recess when the other kids were playing, as she sat at home waiting for her parents on Christmas eve, as she sits in a hospital room with blood on her hands waiting for a final verdict. Radius, ulna, triquetal, lunate.

 

You two need to stop lying to yourselves, Angela tells her over drinks a month before he dies. Just man up and make out already. And bones' hands clench together as she shrugs it off with her usual excuses, because this is the one thing in her life that isn't a lie; temperance brennan and joy keenan have both become falsehoods and when he calls her _bones_ it is finally only the truth.

 

Her studies are always honest with her. They may play tricks at times but their findings are always accurate; this is how she knows herself. So when the day of the funeral hurtles into existence, she stays with the bones for as long as she can. Radius, ulna, triquetal, lunate. She knows herself. She knows herself. She knows enough to see that this pain inside of her does not belong.

 

He still has a headstone; ominously looming in the cemetery only five minutes from her apartment. No one from the FBI seemed to remember it, so she doesn't call it in - she isn't superstitious but this seems something like a reckoning. Seeley Booth, it reads; proud soldier, loving brother. Brennan thinks about how ill this describes him; how this headstone is only an unwanted reminder of an almost.

 

Do you trust me, she asks him later, on a bridge with a body and a murderer and a gun; do you trust me. _Yes,_ he tells her unequivocally, looking at her like no one ever has; she grabs his hand, and starts naming bones.

 

(I love you, she'll tell him in two years when they've swapped places in the fickle game of life and death; I love you, when she's bleeding out in a storage container and all that's left is the truth.)

 

She thinks: I love him. She thinks: it's always been him.

 

(Radius, ulna, triquetal, lunate. This is how she knows herself.)

 

 


End file.
